Welcome to 2008!!

Fast away the old year passes
Hail the new, ye lads and lasses
Sing we joyous all together
Heedless of the wind and weather.

I've been thinking a lot about the mysteries of time this morning. Well, ever since last night, actually!

During last night's countdown, I was on the phone with my wife, which was a wonderful moment. But she was two hours away, so her own "countdown" wouldn't come until later. And it dawned on me that at that moment, I was living in 2008 while she was living in 2007. A love across time, if you will! :)

We were both struck by that thought, that we were living in two different times. Which brings me to this morning's pondering about how God sees time.

I went looking for New Year's blessings and found this...

We are creatures in time and space, and it helps us both practically and psychologically to be able to speak of "this century, this year, this month, this millennium."

But God's time is quite another matter. We don't know about God's time. There's at least a fair chance that it runs in two directions, not just one, forward and back like a bead on a string. Who knows if it's in more than two dimensions? Maybe God's time stands still sometimes. Maybe it dances, bending, contracting, expanding, playing among the galaxies, putting the space-time continuum in a twist. Maybe time is so totally irrelevant to God that we can forget time ever existed. (I doubt that, somehow: time is too neat and fascinating for that.) I am quite certain that Isaac Watts had it wrong when he wrote "A thousand ages in Thy sight/ Are like an evening gone." That's much too simple. I think God's time is going to be far more complicated and mysterious than a simple 1000 age/1 evening ratio. I expect it to be in colours that we humans haven't even thought of yet. ~~Molly Wolf

I love the idea of God's time dancing and bending!

Makes me think of jazz hands and Broadway and "let's put on a show!" Getting ready backstage, waiting for the curtain to rise, so excited you can hardly stand it. And then, once the show begins, the magic that unfolds is dazzling, so bright it lifts you into a whole other dimension.

That's my wish for this next year: moments of magic, razzle-dazzle excitement, and jazz-hand empowerment, sandwiched in between moments of deep watching-the-river-flow contentment!